Space Calendar Project

Last week Jan Gunnar Skjeldsøy and Christian Hummelsund Voie left Kirkenes after three weeks stay in the Bar International Residency Program. During that time we had been to Russia, staying at the coast of the Kola Penninsula, followed by two weeks in Kirkenes. The time in Kirkenes was spent on outlining the further development of the Space Calendar Project.

The Idea of the project is to confront our society with a building, which directly takes part in the natural processes/territory of change – and reminds us of the aspect of time through spatial qualities and interpretations of cultural habits. Since the north has no day in the winter, and no night in the summer, the concept has been structured in order to focalize different cycles. Tidal rhythms are periodic variations in water levels and the region’s strongest image of visualized time. Throughout history this cycle has regulated entire costal communities. Tidal flux dictates when vessels embark and disembark, and thus, in a place-based reversal of Western cultural conventions, it is the moon rather than the sun, that sets the Place’s daily rhythm. This rhythm is further adjusted through changeable outside parameters; such as high and low pressure weather systems, onshore and offshore winds and abrupt temperature oscillations. So, it’s a fine-tuned situation between the Local and the Global (but one never exactly knows its constructed new/other Nature) – nature always adjusts itself according to a complex draft, and the Space Calendar is continually referring to this.

The project defines space by measuring light as a marker and consequence of the shifts in time. – A construction that is constantly emphasizing and reannouncing a shifting environment through its dynamic structural intimacy with tidal flux, stresses qualities such as light and shadow, access, movement and temperature. Confronting its visitors with the dynamism of such natural cycles, its presence would be that of a Territorial Instrument joining the Content with the Context.